Creative Fictions : The Street Photography of Gustavo Minas

Who doesn’t feel that some street photographs have an emotional edge to them? If a street photograph moves us in some way then we can, and we must, say that it has something. Greatness, of course, is a loaded term and what separates out the great from the good and the good and the not so good needs consensus. Time also has a hand in this…

The street photography of Brazilian shooter Gustavo Minas are often gently amusing – a man appears to be trying to shake hands with a shadow – and/or intensely thought-provoking. For me, a winning combination.

Copyrightⓒ Gustavo Minas

Minas’ street work comprises enigmatic shots of real life, edged with beautiful touches of light, shadows, shades of colour, and, at times, rippling textures. Gustavo, in turn, has a keen sense of the light and shade, an eye for the unusual, and slightly off balance scenes of the everyday. Would it be fair to say – with just a hint of Magical Realism?

Well…

A photograph which is 75 per cent red, might be a boat or some kind of ball-shaped structure painted a nice shade of red. At first we might think, ‘So what?’ Then we see the legs, the hint of a red skirt and the beauty of the red shoes. The colour is obvious, of course, but there is one more trick to this photograph – the lady’s hand thrust out to the side, presumably, preparing to flick the ash from her cigarette. A secret smoke hidden behind a red structure of some kind. Red, a colour that denotes ‘stop’ or ‘danger’.

Copyrightⓒ Gustavo Minas

But what is it that drives the Brazilian photographer

“Light, 99 per cent of the time” Gustavo told me simply of what he looks for when he is out on the street, “Now and then I will follow some interesting character or stop by a shady scenario, but most of the time it is only light and the way it can transform anything into beauty – especially if there is glass involved.”

Guatavo Minas grew up in the small Brazillian town of Cassia, which he tells me, is in the interior of Minas Gerais state, Brazil.

“I went to university in Londrina,” He revealed. “It is in the southern part of the country, to study journalism. That is where I learned the basics of photography (speed, aperture, ISO), some dark room and about names such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. After this I moved with some friends to the north of Brazil, the idea was to set up a bar, but it never worked. Then I spent a gap year working as a waiter in London, and finally, I got back to Brazil and started working as a journalist.”

By now photography had become a large part of Minas’ life.

“There has always been an interest,” Gustavo said. “Since high school when I used to photograph barbecues and my, then, girlfriend. But when I moved back to Brazil and started working hard with a newspaper in São Paulo (12 hour days, two weekends per month), I felt I should do something else in my life to relieve the pressure.”

For Gustavo, having succumbed to the art, he was soon looking to learn and improve his work.

“I enrolled in a one year course with Carlos Moreira*,” He continued. “A master who has been photographing São Paulo since the 1960’s, and this changed everything for me. He taught me to photograph for my own satisfaction and self-expression, and about how photography is fiction and creation above all.”

Copyrightⓒ Gustavo Minas

Taken from behind, a woman carrying an umbrella on a rainy evening appears to be looking down, at a mobile phone or an iPod, perhaps. There is another woman in the background while, amusingly, Spiderman appears to be swinging his way toward the first lady.

“The second lady in the scene, out of focus, is my friend Helena,” Gustavo starts up. “That night we had been drinking in a bar close to the El Born area in Barcelona (Spain). When we decided to go home, it was raining heavily and we couldn’t find or call a taxi. After half an hour we just decided to walk in the rain to a bus stop to try our luck, and that’s when it ‘happened’.”

Personally, I like this shot a lot. It is taken at night and once more on a dark and wet evening which creates its own shadows and light reflections from the street. The golden sheen and glare of artificial light bouncing off damp streets and the Spiderman swinging toward the lens does give the composition a surreal feel to it.

“The images I like best,” Gustavo explains, “Are the ones which are more suggestive and evocative, rather than narrative. I like some degree of fiction in my images, and I try to achieve this by different means – through framing, dark shadows or reflections, for example. I like layered images because they are a good representation of the chaos, energy and multiplicity of busy cities. But, of course, sometimes all I have is an empty street and someone walking by, and I’ll photograph that too. I try not to restrict myself.”

Copyrightⓒ Gustavo Minas

He talks a lot about glass and the way the light plays on it and how that, in turn, creates distortion in the sense of reflections. In one image Minas captures a morose gentleman through the glass of a café. A woman to his left, our right, stares out the window (who isn’t wondering about what she is thinking?), while the man stirs his coffee thoughtfully (what is he thinking?).

“This is probably one of the first photographs I took that made me conscious about how reflections work,” He revealed. “How they can be used to convey parallel planes and scenes in a single frame. I don’t remember if I was totally aware of this as I was shooting, but the fact that that silhouette behind me helped me to show the woman inside the glass was a big revelation at that time. Also, this image made me realise that shooting through the glass I could get really close to people and still be relatively unobtrusive. It’s one of the first images of my ‘Bus Station’ series.”

Gustavo Minas’ street photography is by turns, intriguing, amusing and, at times, quite captivating. Is there a ‘magic realism’ about it, so noted of South American culture and especially literature as for example : Isabelle Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jorge Borges? Ironic, because it is in this moment, when I am mulling it over, that Gustavo tells me he has been reading Japanese magic realist Haruki Murakami for the last few years.

“Crazy,” He says, pleasantly surprised that I picked up on this aspect of his street photography. “How a literary influence can show in photography.”

The next project for Gustavo is the release of his book ‘Maximum Shadow Minimal Light’ which will be launched at a solo show at the Freelens Gallery in Hamburg on May23.

“The title of the book is another literary reference,” Minas adds. “Taken from a poem : ‘The Law of How’, by Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski.”

Maybe, in the end, there are connections, and strong connections, between literature and photography, but that is a debate for another day.

Sergio Burns
Sergio Burns Editor at Large, is an Author & a Senior writer for AM, a widely published Journalist in The Mail On Sunday, Contemporary, The Sunday Herald,
Blueprint, The New Entertainer (Spain), In These Times (USA), Austin Chronicles(USA), Whitewall (USA) & Sprudge (USA) to name a few.